I think that the Iphone 3G S was the most awaited gadget on the market this year. Since Apple has sold millions of it, the IPhone has made history. And whilst it is the first mobile phone which commands a share of the mobile phone operators revenues, IPhone remains a sort of refference for the industry.
Given the expectations, Iphone 3G S, the mobile phone from Apple to replace the old 3G, meets the yearly tradition of Apple to relaunch its products. Which the company did this June, as expected. Together with the new McBook Air and the cheaper laptop Apple has launched, the triad of new products is supposed to re-build the fortunes of the company. And this with a Steve Jobs still missing from its helmet.
The odds are not looking good at all. Palm is close to launching the Palm Pre mobile phone, which should make the US operator Sprint a redutable opponent to the market dominator AT&T. And the Palm Pre mobile phone has another big advantage – it uses the brand name and the user-friendly platform of Palm, which is probably the only noteworthy rival for Apple in this high-end market segment.
What new features brings in the IPhone 3G S? Well, not many. A 3 megapixel photo camera can zoom and shoot videaos without any application from the Apple store. Which is something not new, but rather a must-have feature, since even the 50 bucks mobile phones have such a feature. And the camera is pretty weak – now the standard for mobile phones in the high-end segment is 5 to even 10 megapixels.
But Apple does not fight with the camera. It fights with other tools. It incorporates a voice control feature, which needs to be tested. If it works ok, it would be a premiere and could relieve the need to have fancy car kits in your car. So let’s wait and see about this.
The new IPhone 3G S also features a compass – you probably need one in the urban jungle, populated now with hungry ex-bankers, which walk around preying for your secure job. It has also a substantially improved software – which by the way can be downloaded also on your old IPhone 3G (and works pretty well). And it brings in a version of $300 reccomended retail price with 32 GB of memory, which is pretty neat for the predator of multimedia which hides inside yourself.
Overall, the new IPhone 3G S looks like a recession version. It has minor improvements and it does not innovate substantially, as it was expected to. It looks like Aple is trying rather to milk the IPhone cow rather than to cut the edge again with a new product. Which is dangerous in this market, where the competition is attacking it from everywhere (see at least the above mentioned Palm Pre or the Samsung clones which are coming this year to the market). The stock market has received the news with a sort of relief, pushing the Apple share price with a few percentages up. However, the company is pretty far from the expected relaunch of the old times, so caution is required in dealing with this stock…